Strategy for Code Promotion?

[Jay Gamblin]

We are just beginning and need a formalized way for enablement leads to request update set promotions.   What are some strategies?

Should this be a Catalog Item Request or a Change Request?

What are some options for keeping Stories and Update Sets associated from environment to environment (DEV>TEXT>PROD) so when it's time to promote in the next level you know what Update Sets need to be committed?

[HugoFirst]

I will focus on the development life cycle in my answer: ( note we have 3 instances, dev, test and prod )

We use the following steps:

1. Clone prod to dev ( this ensures a pristine development environment )

2. Develop and "unit test" in dev. ( unit test is actually a functional test by the developer, with system testing by QA )

3. When the development is complete, we "promote to test" by:

3.1   clone prod to test.

3.2 promote the changes from dev to test ( usually one or more update sets )

4.0 Conduct user acceptance testing and QA testing in the test instance.

4.1 If we need to fix, we do so in dev with a new update set.   Then apply the update set to test.

5.0 When we receive an acceptance from the user representatives for each change, we promote to prod.

6.0 Gather requirements for next release and repeat.

[Jay Gamblin]

Steve,

Thank you for the valuable information.   However my question was more around the formal process of a code promotion team gathering the information from a large group of developers to know what needs to be promoted to the next environment.

We anticipate one or more update sets per user story.   We may or may not merge update sets down to one per story in the DEV environment.   Then promote to TEST.   Then once testing is good we plan to merge all update sets in TEST to one release and then load/commit those into PROD.

Our challenge is the formal notification/tracking of what needs promoted.   Should we require those who wish us to promote their update sets to create a Change Record or should that be a catalog request or even something else?

[shankarjonnadul]

Hi Jay, Have you found the solution for Code Promotion ? In my current Project we are also looking for Code Promotion Module. Are they any OOB Plugin to activate ? Could you please suggest me the solution Thanks in Advance

[Jay Gamblin]

Bharani,

I decided to create a custom table for code promotions. We added a button on the Update Set form to request a code promotion.   This opens a new Code Promotion form and then the developer submits the update sets for promotion to the next level.   We have a group of code promoters who get notified and watch the requests and process them as needed.   The State values are Draft, Promote to Test, Conflict Resolution, In Test, Promote to Sandbox, In Sandbox, Promote to Prod, Staged In Prod, In Prod, Cancelled.   Track values are Catalog, CMDB, Change, Incident, Knowledge, Platform, Portal, Reporting.  

We typically don't merge anything in DEV because the nature is they need one update set at a time be moved to TEST.   But before moving from TEST to PROD we have a box they can check to request that the sets be merged.